The slowdown in the global economy risks forcing more workers to accept jobs of lower quality, poorly paid, precarious, and lacking social protection, worries Monday the International Labor Organization (ILO) in a new report. The organization also predicts a slight increase in unemployment in Europe.
The ILO’s “World Employment and Social Issues” report draws difficult trends for the labor market in 2023. It forecasts that global employment growth will be limited to 1%, less than half of the 2022 level, and that unemployment is expected to increase by around 3 million units, to reach 208 million (5.8% unemployment rate). This would be a reversal of the decline in global unemployment seen between 2020 and 2022.
These forecasts vary widely across parts of the globe, with the Europe and Central Asia region particularly hard hit by the economic fallout from the conflict in Ukraine. Employment there is expected to decline in 2023 but unemployment rates are expected to increase only slightly. The study, on the other hand, predicts employment growth of around 3% in Africa and the Arab States, without, however, a real decline in unemployment rates due to the increase in their working-age population. The report also questions the quality of jobs, “an important subject of concern”.
The ILO says the chronic shortage of better job opportunities is set to worsen and many workers will have to accept lower quality, poorly paid jobs, sometimes with insufficient working hours. The situation is also particularly difficult for women workers. On a global scale, the activity rate of women remained far from that of men in 2022: 47.4% once morest 72.3%. Young people between the ages of 15 and 24 also face serious difficulties in finding and keeping decent work, adds the ILO. Their unemployment rate is three times that of adults.
This overall deterioration in the labor market is mainly explained by the emergence of geopolitical tensions and the war in Ukraine, the uneven recovery from the pandemic and the persistence of bottlenecks in global supply chains. “Due to the slowdown in global employment growth, we do not expect to be able to recover the losses suffered during the Covid-19 crisis before 2025”, comments Richard Samans, director of the ILO’s research department and report coordinator.
“Slowing productivity growth is also of great concern to us, as productivity is key to addressing the interrelated crises we face in purchasing power, ecological sustainability and human well-being.”
